In general, this invention relates to feeding and assembly apparatus and, more particularly, to a machine in which items are predeterminately positioned and deposited in a row.
Feeding and assembly apparatus as is known from the prior art does not have the ability to automatically feed, align and position different type items to be packaged together without excessive amounts of human intervention to feed, align and check the product. For example, many candy bars are produced with a plurality of different components forming a single unitary bar, or with the plurality of different components packaged in a unitary wrapping. The machine must deposit one item in each of a plurality of rows so that an assembly may be made of the different items included in the single package. According to the prior art, processing a candy bar having a number of different component parts was accomplished by a plurality of stations with a number of hand operations in which each operator would deposit one of the plurality of items in a row and each station operator would be responsible for insuring that each assembly in each row included a different item from the associated station. In a conveying system which can handle a multitude of rows at one time, the use of many operators is a costly and uneconomical method of producing such a candy bar or similar type product. Therefore, it was necessary to accomplish at least the automatic feeding and assembly of multi-item candy bars, since the escalating costs of ingredients and labor combined to make the price prohibitive. These and other problems were solved by apparatus of the following invention.